Mice songs may be the key to curing the human stutter

This time of year we’re all hearing a lot of Christmas songs, but are humans the only ones singing them?

According to The Atlantic, scientists say that mice are known to sing to each other and on rare occasions, humans can hear their high-pitched tunes.

In 1999 Timothy Holy, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, discovered male mice sing when they smell a female mouse’s pheromones nearby. Through this discovery he realized that since mice lack of vocal cords they are excellent subjects to help understand the basics of human speech.

Holy is using this connection to further the science of human speech conditions. By splicing in a human stuttering gene into a mouse, he created a shuttering mouse that opened up the doors for medication development. With these genetically modified mice it is possible scientists can start developing drugs for common human speech conditions like stuttering and Tourette syndrome.